A Standards Track EIP describes any change that affects most or all Ethereum implementations, such as—a change to the network protocol, a change in block or transaction validity rules, proposed application standards/conventions, or any change or addition that affects the interoperability of applications using Ethereum. Standards Track EIPs consist of three parts—a design document, an implementation, and (if warranted) an update to the formal specification. Furthermore, Standards Track EIPs can be broken down into the following categories:
- Core: improvements requiring a consensus fork (e.g. EIP-5, EIP-101), as well as changes that are not necessarily consensus critical but may be relevant to “core dev” discussions (for example, [EIP-90], and the miner/node strategy changes 2, 3, and 4 of EIP-86).
- Networking: includes improvements around devp2p (EIP-8) and Light Ethereum Subprotocol, as well as proposed improvements to network protocol specifications of whisper and swarm.
- Interface: includes improvements around language-level standards like method names (EIP-6) and contract ABIs.
- ERC: application-level standards and conventions, including contract standards such as token standards (ERC-20), name registries (ERC-137), URI schemes, library/package formats, and wallet formats.
learn more on EIPs at EIP-1